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Job Burnout is a Major Health Problem Job burnout is one of the top health conditions of people in the workplace, said Ronald Downey, a Kansas State University psychology professor. Downey is conducting research on job burnout with two other professors, Scott Hemonover and Leon Rappoport. They have looked at what job burnout is, the consequences of job burnout and how to cope with job burnout. Downey said job burnout has three characteristics. The first characteristic of job burnout is emotional exhaustion. Emotional exhaustion is when a person is unable to cope, they can't deal with the positive or the negative, he said. The second characteristic of job burnout is depersonalization. Depersonalization is distancing oneself from the job, he said. This can happen toward coworkers or toward customers, Downey said. "For example," Downey said, "in a hospital setting, health care workers might refer to the broken leg in room 331 instead of using the patient's name." The third characteristic is a decreased sense of personal accomplishment. Personal accomplishment is a person's feeling he or she has accomplished what needed to be done in a day's time, Downey said. Job burnout comes from job stressors, Downey said, and job stressors come from work overload. Overload is when the employers demand more from their employees, and when employees work more hours during the week, he said. In addition to work overload, role conflict contributes to job burnout, he said. Role conflict is when a person is required to assume different roles in the workplace, he said. Downey used a teacher as an example; at times, they are mentors to students, at other times they are the evaluator. Downey said job burnout has two major consequences. The first consequence of job burnout is the intention to turn over, he said. When a job gets stressful, it becomes easier for the person to say they will leave it, he said. The second consequence of job burnout is a decrease in job satisfaction and involvement, he said. "Although this doesn't necessarily equal poor performance, it can lead to a high turnover rate," he said. When looking at job burnout, many researchers look at environmental factors, Downey said. "It is also important to look at the disposition, or personality traits, of the individuals," he said. Downey said the research team looked at how a person's disposition reacts with job stressors to lead to job burnout. Job stressors embody the person-environment relationship and the processes that underlie this association, he said. "Given a specific personality trait a person reacts to job stressors, not job burnout," he said. The person-job fit concept is what Downey uses to explain how to cope with job stressors and job burnout. The personality of a person isn't subject to change, he said. You have to teach people how to cope with the stressors, he said. "Training people to deal with stressors could be as simple as just getting them to ask if they fit their job," Downey said. "The next step is to collect data from the work place that is not a self-report. This would include measures of work load and actual turnover in the organization," he said. This research was funded by Kansas State University and the Office of Naval Research.
Story prepared by Heather Sommers
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